Tweets, Books, and Basecamp
Tiny MBA Full Case Study
Category: Book Design, Publishing, Freelance
The Tiny MBA is a book design project I recently completed for a client here in the Philadelphia area. The client, Alex Hillman, hired me to create the book from start to finish: concept, design, and set up for print-on-demand publishing and e-book distribution.
The content of the book started out as a lengthy “thread” on Twitter, where Alex offered 100 business tips as part of a trending challenge. After several months, Alex’s tweets were still getting “retweeted” and shared around the world, so he started to think he should package it up somehow and bring it to the world outside of Twitter. But he had no idea how that would work.
I had worked with Alex a few months prior on a zine produced for an event he was organizing, and we started talking about the potential for making a book from his tweets.
Alex had very little solid intuition or vision for what he wanted this book to look like, but he said half of him wanted it to “look like a classic business book” and the other half wanted it “to go in the total opposite direction.”
I completed the general page formatting, frontmatter, and backmatter first, and the 100 business tips themselves, then moved on to the hard part: coming up with an attractive trademark style for the covers, and 3 full-page typographic treatments for emphasizing certain lessons.
Alex and I communicated throughout the project in a highly collaborative environment using Basecamp, which made it easy to stay organized while reviewing different iterations of a design. We used chat to discuss in live time what elements were working and where something wasn’t quite there yet, and comments on uploaded files served to always offer context when we were in asynchronous stages of the project.
We spent by far the most time on the typographic treatments, trying to figure out the aesthetic we wanted to go for. We tried forming the words inside objects to form an illustration made up of words, and found it difficult to maintain readability at a distance. Drawing influence from newspaper ads from the 70’s, I started to redesign the typographic treatments on a simple black background with a friendly, chunky font that had a great selection of stylistic alternates.
Once the “Bigger isn’t better, better is better” treatment was made, Alex was sold on the design direction and approved moving forward with the next 2.
From there, I pulled memories of dusty bargain books left in summer lodges and rec center basements to create the cover design, using a 1970’s-friendly mustard hue for the backdrop. The two concentric rounded rectangles gave the book a familiar vibe for readers of all ages, but particularly reminded one test reader of a very similar framing device on the cover of John Muir’s 1969 manual, “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.”
This further cemented the value of our design for my client and I, and we charged ahead getting it ready for print-on-demand publishing with Lulu.com, and for sale as an e-book, and through Amazon’s KDP platform. As a finishing touch to unbalance the cover just a tiny bit, I created a custom “price sticker” in Illustrator and Photoshop to carry the word “The” in the title.
Once launched, The Tiny MBA sold more than 2000 copies around the world in under 8 weeks, and made a big splash in the world of entrepreneur/startup news. Philadelphia’s own Technical.ly wrote about the project here. Alex has also been featured on podcasts, radio interviews, and spoken on conference panels about the project since its launch in August.
Programs Used
Adobe InDesign
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Acrobat Pro
Lulu.com platform
Calibre e-book converter